"In Australia, Media Made Us Villains": Gautam Adani On Carmichael Coal Project

NDTV

3 days ago

Lucknow:
In one of the most candid public reflections of his career, Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani on Wednesday spoke at length about the storm of global criticism and coordinated resistance his group faced over the Carmichael coal project in Australia.
Addressing faculty and students at the Indian Institute of Management in Lucknow, the Adani Group Chairman described the decade-long battle to execute the controversial project as a defining test of resilience - one that transformed not just a company, but also an individual.
"In Australia, the international media made us villains," Gautam Adani said, pausing for a moment before adding: "Banks walked away. Insurance companies refused to back us. Activists blocked roads. Legal cases were filed. We were accused in courtrooms, debated in parliaments, and criticised in headlines. Our people on the ground were harassed. Our right to exist on that land was questioned. Everywhere we turned, the message was clear: back down."
He did not.
Gautam Adani's account of the Carmichael mine saga was not an attempt to sanitise the project's environmental impact - a subject that continues to divide opinion. Instead, he framed it as a moral and strategic choice. Not a monument to coal, as critics alleged, but a monument to energy security. Not a commercial indulgence, but a national imperative. "It was not born out of ambition for coal," he said. "It was born out of a consequence to provide India with better-quality coal. It was born out of a consequence to reduce carbon emissions, as well as to secure India's energy independence."
What made the project so politically fraught was its location and timing. Here was an Indian company entering one of the most stringently regulated democracies in the world, proposing to build one of its largest energy projects in the face of organised, transnational environmental opposition. "We had no political capital in Australia. No historical presence. No institutional support. And yet, we stood our ground," he said.
Gautam Adani's remarks come at a moment when India's energy strategy is under renewed global scrutiny -- caught between pressure to accelerate its renewable transition and the enduring reality of its coal-dependent base load. His comments on the Australia episode served to illustrate a larger theme running through his speech: that bold leadership often invites resistance, and that conviction without comfort is a necessary condition for long-term impact.
The Carmichael project, which began as an audacious bet, has since evolved into a critical Indo-Australian corridor - both economic and strategic. The Adani Group chief said the project now powers industries with cleaner coal, supports thousands of livelihoods in Australia and stands as a testament to the company's refusal to capitulate to external pressure. He described it as not a story of fossil fuel but a story of endurance.
The speech, delivered with precision and emotional clarity, marked a departure from traditional business school lectures. There were no slides, no charts and no hedging. Instead, Gautam Adani offered an unscripted personal philosophy rooted in risk, belief and defiance. He told the students that business frameworks alone cannot shape the future. The future, he said, is built by those who are willing to draw maps where none exist - even if the world pushes back.
This defiance was not positioned as corporate bravado. It was set in the context of larger, harder questions - about leadership in a world where the line between global governance and ideological activism is increasingly blurred - about the asserted right of emerging economies to pursue development on their terms - and about the heavy personal toll that long-term vision often demands.
Throughout his address, Gautam Adani returned to the idea that extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary determination and persistence. "The easy road rarely builds lives worth remembering," he told the students. "It is the bold path - the one filled with risk and resistance - that shapes leaders the world remembers."
His account of Australia was also a cautionary tale - a reminder that disruption is rarely celebrated in the present. Often, it is only in retrospect that such choices are seen for what they were: acts of imagination, of courage and of nation-building.
As he closed his remarks, the Adani Group Chairman made no attempt to portray the past as perfect or the future as predictable. Instead, he invited the students to confront discomfort, to welcome difficulty and to understand that greatness is not the absence of struggle, but the mastery of it.
"Let your journey be the evidence", he said, "that dreams rooted in Indian soil can stand firm, even when the world tries to push them down."